I'm sure way too many of us had a twinge of self-recognition this past Sunday upon reading the "Pearls Before Swine" comic strip.

LOL.

Getting a bit off-topic, but this reminded my of many years ago on the Santa Fe 2nd District in Pasadena, CA. The local freight would take siding at Chapman, on the eastern edge of Pasadena in the evening to let #18 (the Super Chief) go by. The crew would tie down and walk about a block to the Bob's Big Boy drive-in restaurant for "beans". I envisioned a track crew laying a spur to the restaurant so the train could reach the drive-in area, and the servers (young women called car-hops in those days) could place car-service trays in the windows of the locomotive and the caboose.

Not trains, but a related subject, trolley coaches, which of course, can only go where the wire does, or so the theory goes. There was a story I heard some forty years ago when Chicago still had trolley buses, that the late Glenn Anderson, father of IRM's trackless trolley collection, arranged a fan trip for the Omnibus Society. While Glenn was in CTA management, he had started as a bus servicer and was qualified to drive the coaches, and drove this trip. When it got to be lunch time, he swung the coach off the street into a prearranged empty portion of a drive-in parking lot. The car hops came out and took the orders, then hung the trays on the bus windows. When lunch was finished, everyone got out and helped push the coach back under wire, and the trip continued.

Dennis -

I had forgotten about the Omnibus Society. I had a friend (the late Tom Kopriva) who was a member. I think he used to tell me that the Society actually owned a CTA bus of some type. The number 1101 sticks in my mind, but maybe that's not it. There seemed to be problems on what to do with the vehicle. I think it was before bus collection at IRM started. Anyway, thanks for the very interesting story. I wonder if anyone took a photo of the food trays, hanging from the bus windows? That's got to be worth publication somewhere, if such a picture exists.

Les

Sam McAfee. past Master Mechanic with New Orleans, told me of his experience with the trolley coaches. When he was assigned to the supervisory position over the trolley coaches, there had been very unsatisfactory performance and many maintenance issues with the fleet. Sam, on a Saturday morning, had all the mechanics report and assigned each one of them a particular coach with the explicit instructions to find, repair, and test each coach.

After the day ended, the maintenance and problems with the trolleys had disappeared. The next week, Sam's boss asked if the coaches were operating properly and Sam assured him they were. The boss asked for a demo that evening. So, Sam and the boss waited until after operating hours and met at the barn. Sam started up one of the coaches and they went around the barn area. The boss asked how fast was the pickup in speed from a standing start. Sam parked the bus at the street intersection that had an overhead line running a short distance and proceeded to floor it.

Without thinking, the race was on - until they ran out of overhead. The poles went to clanging as they left the wire , the lights went out, and the neighborhood awoke to the clatter and noise. Lights went on in many of the houses along the street and people came out to see what was going on. Well, Sam and the boss just sat in the darkened coach until everyone had gone back inside and then proceeded to push the coach back under the wire so Sam could back it up and put it in the barn.

Sam had a bunch of stories that I was privileged to hear when he and I got together.

Harry

Those of you who rode streetcar fantrips in Pittsburgh in the 1960s and early '70s may remember a cigar-chomping motorman named Eddie Lang. Eddie was always the motorman for any fantrip using snowplow car M454 as he was one of the few men left who was qualified on pre-PCC equipment. He had a ton of stories, including one about the day he was running a single truck snow sweeper in a part of town where he had never been before. It had been a heavy snowfall, so the rails were invisible. Coming down a hill, he saw that the street rose steeply past a intersection at the bottom of the grade, so he wrapped up the controller to get a run for it. Too late, he realized that the trolley wires made an abrupt right turn at the intersection....

/s/ Larry

Here is Eddie Lang that Larry mentioned in the previous post posed in front of PAT 1730 "Mod Desire" on a fan trip.